However, by taking this step, I thought I may benefit from it in more than one ways. First of all, the traffic to the blog may slightly improve and more important the reach (number of page views per visit). Secondly, it is a good way to connect to other blogs in the same niche which I believe may widen the network neighborhood and hence help with the SEO aspects.

Benefits for you as a commenter

The SEO benefit mentioned above is just not for me but more for the commenters. By getting a direct dofollow link to your homepage directly from an inner page here, you are at the better side.

Further, though not in 100s of hits, you may receive some referral visitors from this blog as well. Overall it is a win-win.

I had this image of being less-friendly in the blogosphere mainly due to my bold speeches in the social media and hence I would love to attract more friendly discussions on the blog than outside of it. Hopefully, I can get more friendly.

New comment policy

We have a new comment policy now. Before trying to comment here, you may please go through it once so that there’s no misunderstanding – just in case your comment get deleted in the moderation process.

Basically, I would give weightage to relevancy to the topic, same or similar niche, comment quality etc before deciding to approve a comment. Well, I have been doing this for a while now but, henceforth, it’s going to be a bit stricter.

Over to you…

Though there are a lot of people who now argue that dofollow commenting do not have any benefits, I personally believe and see that dofollow blogs are still attracting a lot of interest.

What is your take on allowing dofollow commenting? Do you think it will be mutually beneficial for SEO and traffic? Do you think the commentluv will add further value to it (though for now I am not thinking of deep linking from comments section)?

Happy commenting!

All of us know that social sites like Facebook and Twitter are NOT meant for kids under the age of 13. However, the number of kids secretly using (or with their dumb parents’ consent) SocNets is growing at an alarming pace. Do we have systems, tools and regulations to prevent this?

The threat

Minor kids using computers is not a crime nor something that should be stopped. However, there are some potential threats here that every parent should be aware of.

1. Access to rated material illegal content

Since private friend networks cannot be readily monitored by an outsider, it is so easy for kids to get access to illegal content and media links via their personal networks. These things cannot be prevented easily by even the state of the art parental control systems. Having said that, the problem existed earlier as well (due to forums, chat rooms etc) but it is getting more and more difficult to tackle now.

2. Online bullying

Clueless kids can be easily exposed to online bullying and cyber stalking as kids generally have the tendency to group up and attack a hapless opponent. In the online scenario, this usually happens without their parents or custodians knowing about these incidents and it can have long lasting negative impacts on kids. Several non-profit organizations have come up with online bullying grievance sites but not as an organized effort yet.

3. Getting hooked up with strangers

Since online identities can never be proven, kids can get connected to strangers who may not be from the same age groups as kids. Teenage girls getting connected to befriending adult men in their 40s and 50s is a possibility (and has actually happened as reported by the press many times) and you can imagine the impact of the same.

4. Impact on the child’s brain

Recent studies have shown that the most common use of computers by kids is for gaming purpose and this has a very bad impact on the brain of a child. Fast paced TV shows and games are the primary culprits that causes kids to lose attention in other activities including face to face communication.

5. Lack of focus on studies

Continuing from the last point, excessive usage of computers can cause kids to lose out on their school activities and studies. It is possible that we may only have e-schools in the future. However, humans are supposed to be social animals (not online) and I strongly believe that face to face communication is a must to make the best use of our five senses. Basically the human-touch (literally as well) is required in everything that you experience in life. Some parents think it’s a cool thing for their kids to be able to use computers for a lot of things. But how many of those cool things add the kids brain development, intellectual growth and emotional maturity?

6. Ruined face to face relationship

Fast online relationships and ever-growing friends list would mean that you tend to care less about your family people. Many kids of this generation don’t even look straight into their parents’ eyes. I have seen many kids just coming back from school with a droopy head, dumping the school bag and directly going to the computer to be with their online friends. It is a big social issue and it wasn’t the case with other online collaboration channels such as chat rooms. It’s something that is resulted out of the recent social network and gaming boom.

7. Less talk and more typing in

A continuation of 6: Kids of this generation tends to talk less and type (or mobile text) more. This has affected their oral communication skills, writing skills and usage of hand in general. The modern kid gets their hand control and coordination very late compared to the last generation.

8. Naive online behaviour

Most minor kids are not aware of the potential hazards of getting the computer exposed to strangers (people as well as applications). It is so easy for your family computer getting hacked when kids use it more. Also when kids keep creating a lot of accounts for online gaming, social networking purpose etc, it can result in an increased level of spam in their email boxes and many of them don’t know how to tackle it.

How can we fix the issues?

It’s about time we had systems, regulations and intervention from parents, families and organizations to prevent our kids from getting spoiled online. The following are some of the remedies that I can think of:

SocNet privacy policy need to be emphasized

Social network sites are competing each other to increase their membership and in that process they do not really mind kids accessing these sites. If you take look at the privacy policy of facebook or that of twitter you will realize that they haven’t really highlighted (in bold) the age requirement for their members or sign-ups. In fact, just like those adult sites, during signup itself they should throw a message which states something like “Exit now if you are below 13 years”.

Parents need to educate to kids

Just like the sex education, kids need to be told about the existence of social networking sites, adult sites etc and when they are supposed to access them. Kids may be interested in using them to play social games like Farmville etc but they should be strictly kept away from them until the age requirement is met. Moreover, the kids need to be taught to befriend only those people that he/she know in their real lives.

Parents need to monitor kids

It is very very important for you as a parent to monitor what kids do online. This is not just the case with what they do at home, but they should be monitored even from their friends’ places etc via good parent networking.

It may be even a good idea that one of the parents (or both) is in the kid’s friend list to help them get involved in the kid’s activities. The parents should be more like friends to kids.

Parental control systems

Most of the parental control systems that are available in the market today do not really control site access by proper child filters. For example, there is usually a blanket filter on social network sites but this doesn’t quite do the job. If they are kids friendly socnets, these systems should automatically identify them and allow.

Fixed computer time

Every child, even if he has his own computer, needs to be told that he has a fixed amount of computer time (even TV time for that) available per day and the parents should strictly enforce that rule. This kind of time table can help them use their computers for more productive purposes if this schedule is properly defined (e.g. time to check mails, using online tutorials etc)

Kids SocNet sites

It’s about time we had several kids social networking sites on the web. I am yet to see a proper kids socnet site as all that we get to see off late is some game sites or forums mostly run by TV channels, toy shop chains etc. Instead of junk forums, we need to have really good social networking sites for kids whereby kids under 13 can access relevant contents and collaborate there. Even if dedicated kids socnets are available, the parents still need to monitor their kids.

Kids grievance cells and sites

Several countries and organizations have already set up online bullying grievance cells for kids. There needs to be more effort along this lines and kids should be made aware of the availability of such services. However, at the end the parents, teachers and friends have more responsibility than anyone else to help kids to cope with any difficulties that they might have faced while socializing online.

Over to you

Have you got a kid below 13 years in your family who gets to use social network sites such as facebook?

If so, did you ever know that they shouldn’t be using it? Have you ever monitored what they have been doing online?

Happy (and safe) social life!

PS:- I was intending to post this on my personal blog but considering the social media aspect, it ended up here.

[Image courtesy: PhotoBucket]

A quick glance at your Google Analytics traffic data on visitors (New vs. Returning) will probably reveal that more than 80% of your blog visitors are absolutely new visitors. Your blogging success and sustainability really lies in converting these new hits into long term readers and associates for your online marketing success. But have you done enough to convince (and convert) them?

Types of new visitors

New readers or visitors to your blog are mostly coming out of the following sources:

• Internet search (mostly)
• Social bookmarks (sporadically)
• Reference links (again sporadically)
• Via ad campaigns (predictably)
• Word of mouth (rarely)

The first two of the above traffic sources are of interest to us as in most cases – unless you run a high budget ad campaign – they contribute to more than 90% of the fresh traffic. Now the question is ‘how do you convince and convert them into potential money or at least subscribers to your ideas?‘

The following are some of the steps that you can take in order to get the best out of your new visitors:

#1 Adding them to an email list

Well, how to increase your RSS subscribers is a stale idea. The trend nowadays is moving away from increasing RSS subscribers towards building an email list because of the following three reasons.

• Click through and conversion from RSS subscription is very poor
• Email lists are for both genuine readers and potential campaign targets
• Email list programs are well managed and can create, manage and track campaigns whereas sometimes we can’t really get hold of all your RSS subscribers
• Offer and subscribe model works well with email lists – Also a good mechanism to

Hence, building an email list throwing the right bait is one of the methods that work. Be careful not to throw your popups right on their faces as most bloggers do of late. There has to be a sensible approach towards this something like what I discussed in the MaxBlogPress Subscribers Magnet review.

#2 Direct sale proposal

This is something that always worked for me. The idea here is to showcase your latest deals and offers via the right plugins and scripts to show it only to your search visitors, referral visitors etc. For example, one could modify a plugin such as wp-greet box to get the best out of your new visitors without being too intrusive. The alternate option would be to use the affiliate links without causing much disturbance to the first time visitors (By the way, we have extended the $30 OFF offer on MaxBlogPress Ninja Affiliate Plugin till September 02, 2010)

#3 Prolong the visit time

Prolonging the per visit time is not only good for your ranks (such as Alexa) but also increases the chances of getting a long term reader. A few ideas to prolong the average stay time include:

• Having recent posts above the fold
• ‘You may be also interested in’ or ‘real related posts/topics’ linked at the end of the post
• Having an enticing commenting provision
• Throwing an interesting offer for subscribing
• …and most importantly the SEO part whereby you have to make sure that he’s landed on a page that he was actually searching for. Or in simple terms ‘be relevant’ (See #6)

#4 Comment follow up

Now, you got somebody to comment on your blog for the first time. That’s even better than a casual ‘hit and run‘ and you have to get the best out of it. A few things you can do to him will include a follow up message using a suitable plugin, or even better, have a confirm link within it to subscribe to your email list. This is something that most bloggers don’t do (including me) but it works like a charm.

#5 Easy to find/subscribe fan pages

Well, not all fan pages have really resulted in providing any immediate impact. However, they are like mouthpieces of your blogging and online activity and they can slowly replace other intrusive mechanisms like email lists. If you can provide a highly visible ‘one click join’ to these fan pages, it can do wonders for you in the future. This will also help to get hold of the laziest-of-all visitors who hate to type in anything.

#6 Declare what your blog stands for

It is a very good idea to ‘describe your blog in one or two short sentences‘ and add that as the greeting in order to assure the new visitor that the place he has just landed is the right one for him. This can actually increase the stickiness of really interested visitors. At the same time, it may not always be a good idea to add a ’subscribe to my…’ link in the greeting box.

The avoid list

Long back, I had written about those things that can rub your visitors the wrong way. Some more additions to that list will include:

• Offering worthless e-books
• Subscribe-to popups
• Offensive marketing language
• Over selling

What about the returning visitor?

Why not a ‘posts since your last visit‘ or ‘things that you missed‘ kind of bullet list? Anybody want to write such a simple plugin?

Happy blogging!

I am not a professional blogger as in “I do not need to blog to earn a life”. I have a well paid job in the Software Industry and hence whatever money I earn online is going as donations, charity and cash backs to my referrals. Unfortunately this doesn’t seem to be going well with the HostGator affiliate ToS.

How I detected the suspension?

Unlike Google, nobody really sent me a mail stating that, I was slapped with a suspension. However, as pending referral money wasn’t getting paid so many days after the due date, I contacted the affiliate support and I got this news. It went like this “This account was suspended from the program for offering cash back rebates which is against our terms of service”

When I went through their affiliate ToS, there was nothing like this mentioned there. While I am still working with the support team to get the suspension lifted, I am not sure if it’s possible at all. The result is that, I am loosing a huge amount of money that are dues from HostGator side which I had actually agreed to share with some of my referrals. Basically I lost my face here!

Getting banned while dues are pending?

It’s a very common thing with Google AdSense program that they ban publishers without paying their dues. I wasn’t quite expecting similar behavior with HostGator and other affiliate programs. Anyhow, I feel it’s a pretty harsh thing from these affiliate schemes. Because, even when they aren’t paying your or suspending you, your referrals are still with them and hence you have created business for them. There has to be at least one warning mail sent out or cleared the dues, before such decisions are taken.

Anyhow, I am still a fan of HostGator shared hosting services and their wonderful affiliate program. But I hereby would like to apologize to my referrals that I am unable to pay back the promised rebates on HostGator signups. I have already sent you individual mails on this.

Over to you?

Have you ever got banned by any affiliate programs? If so, did they show the basic courtesy of sharing your dues before taking such a decision??

(PS: Rest of the rebate programs are still very much valid)

I was going through my Google reader last night to check and recheck the content quality of all those 90 odd blogs that I am following. I keep doing this clean up activity once in a while. Needless to say 80% of the blog that I follow are dealing with Internet, Technology and related online topics such as social media. The rest of the blogs in my favorite lists were personal blogs, photo blogs and some corporate mouthpieces. The shocking fact was that 90% of those tech blogs that I had in my list were having most of their post topics stolen from elsewhere, inspired or consolidated from multiple sources whereas most of the personal blogs had somewhat unique content. (Tech blogs in this post’s context is anything related to computer and Internet)

Plagiarism in tech blogosphere

Before proceeding further, I must pause a while to appreciate the work of those handful of people who, without referring or copying from elsewhere, wrote some of those wonderful blog posts that are full of life and based on own experience. This included some technical blogs as well but mainly personal blogs. Most of these bloggers are unsung heroes because they do it with a purpose of writing for justice, to hold up the culture and beliefs they have or even imagining and writing about some innovative technical or new generation topics.

Now, coming back to the plagiarism in the technical blogosphere. Couple of days ago I read a very interesting comment on Facebook by a successful Indian tech blogger. Basically, he wanted all his FB friends to protest against someone who had apparently stolen one of his blog post points as a whole to compete some contest. At first, I thought he had a valid point with him but when he browsed that particular post of his, I figured out that even he himself has taken a dozen or more pictures from elsewhere and copyrighted it with a proud www.hisblog.com. And most topics he was writing about was something that was already present on the web but major traffic generators. I have no grudge against any such smart people but then they shouldn’t crib about others stealing their ideas.

Plagiarism is not just about copying something as it is. Even if you take content from two or three different places and putting it together in a single post is kind of content stealing as well.

The following are some of the modern, smart content copying technicians that I have observed and according to me they still are faces of plagiarism:

1. TechCrunch and Mashable mash-up bloggers

A huge number of sub-standard technical bloggers, depend a great deal on big technical blogs to get ideas. Basically they can be called blog re-writers and not bloggers.

2. Consolidators from multiple sites

So, you want to write a post that goes like 15 money making ideas for college students, and you go get those fifteen ideas in less than fifteen minutes from three or four other blogs. So easy, isn’t it? They possess exceptional consolidation skills.

3. Blog and feed scrapers

Biggest losers of them all are the blog scrapers – All that they need to have is a registered domain, blog platform installation on a shared hosting account and some free tools. The

4. The traffic generator blogger

Basically, his blog may not be standing for any particular topic but can dig out traffic generating and buzzing content by digging into anything current. In fact, these bloggers, since they are into most searched hot stuff, may not copy stuff as it is always but their content will be mostly incomplete.

5. The tech-liar or clueless

Basically, these people (a variation of the previous category) do not have any know-how nor are they any subject matter experts. However, as and when they hear something now, they just write some crap that mostly remains in the title only. Basically, they don’t know what they are talking about but they may still drive traffic with high bounce rate. They will never have any patronage or involvement from readers.

Where do these blogs and bloggers come from?

Though I do not want to specify a particular country, from what I have observed, a huge percentage of these ‘smart bloggers’ come from fast developing nations or where the number of educated but jobless people are very high.

Summary

Basically the point I am trying to drive is that there’re very few genuine tech bloggers around us who writes about really unique topics. While it may not be possible to write everything fresh and innovative, it may be still okay to write on a 50-50 basis (i.e. 50% unique stuff and 50% inspired). I would like to believe that I belong there as I have multiple blogs – personal and otherwise.

Your assignment: Could you name three bloggers who churn out very unique content and thoughts every single time they go out there to blog?

Happy blogging!

Though I am not an expert in the area of blog flipping, I already realize its potential to make money online. In this post, let me share my first experience of site flipping and general guidelines for those who want to get into the online flipping business.

What is website flipping?

In layman terms, website flipping is the business of buying and selling websites. Essentially when you are doing site flipping business, you are doing one of the following things:

1. Buy a new domain, build website or blog content around it, scale it and sell it for a profit

2. Buy an existing website or blog, improve it and sell it

Needless to say, when the website is a blog and when you sell the same, it is called blog flipping.

Types of flipping

As you probably recall, domain flipping (the art of registering/buying domain names and selling them) was a major business in late 90s and early 2000. Getting a shorter meaningful domain name was considered a major thing then and those who got into that act early enough made thousands of dollars in no time.

The website flipping is not exactly having the same business potential but it can be a profitable business if done carefully.

Short term flipping

In the case of short term flipping, you buy and keep a number of websites, build minimal content or improvise existing content and flip for a relatively small margin in a short time span, say less than a couple of months. In such a business model, one needs to have several websites under his ownership to make any meaningful profit.

Flip long term asset

Many people own websites or blogs that are meant for long term regular income generation. At times, they might decide to sell it of due to change in lifestyle, family status, regular work status, need for money etc and this is more about long term flipping. In this case, the seller may not be exactly looking at replicating the success of this model again.

Though there are not clearly defined categories, the above mentioned categories are what I have generally seen. Please pitch in if I am wrong in my assumption here.

Tips for successful site flipping

1. Minimize initial investment

Since we consider flipping as a business, obviously low-investment, high-return should be the strategy. Hence initial investment on domain name registration, picking a shared hosting service, buying themes/web development services etc should be as minimal as possible. One should go for cheapest domain names and reuse of existing hosting accounts, free themes etc wherever applicable.

2. Improve rapidly

The improvement on the website in terms of content, link building, social network presences etc should be done at a rapid pace that you can minimize the total time duration and hold period before you flip the site. Typically, this should be something like less than two or three months.

3. Brand it to improve value

If you can spend a little more money on a good logo, a decent theme, overall coordinated social presence and collaboration, that would definitely add value to the entity to be flipped.

4. Care about ranks and stats

One of the things that potential buyers are crazy about is the ranks and stats. Good Google page rank, traffic ranks and search positioning etc add a lot of value to your site while flipping the same. You have to also care about not degrading the same while the auction is in progress.

5. Monetize before you flip

Most of the time, websites that already make money definitely get sold faster than others with monetizing potential but not yet monetized. Also, adding proof of income to the auction list will add more value.

6. Flip while it is still scaling high

One needs to sell a website that is going up in ranks and stats and almost reaching the peak with your optimized efforts. Nobody would really buy sites that are not active and going down in ranks for a while. So timing is very important as well. Other things to consider are the time of domain registration or hosting renewal – you should be able to sell your sites before such recurring expenses take place.

7. Price it right

The bidding (or auction) process needs you to set your BIN (Buy-It-Now) price and threshold price or the minimum price at which you are willing to sell. A good BIN price would be something like 10x your current income from the site though it depends a great deal on a lot of parameters such as age of domain, content quality, income pattern etc. Also, a lot of young bloggers do not really count the effort that they have put in to write blog posts while selling their sites. You have to really price the site right including the intellectual property value and associated efforts.

8. Proper propaganda for optimum sell price

Once you have your bid listed, you need to really promote the sale intention via blog posts, twitter, facebook etc. I didn’t quite do this and hence resulted in low interest of a potentially good site. Also, you should be available for answering queries from potential buyers and also approve their bids on time.

The following article talks about 20 sites where you can flip or sell your website, blog or domains. I used Flippa.com in my particular case.

My flipping story

I sold DoFollowBlogsList.com for a mere $160 and that price didn’t do justice to the coding work I did, if not for anything else. However, I didn’t want to hold it anyhow and I am sure the person who bought it can actually flip it for twice of thrice that price in a few months from now.

Though, I do not believe that site flipping is not a consistent means of making money on the Internet, it can work in your favor at times.

Happy blog flipping!

Starting from today (31st July, 2010), we are offering the MaxBlogPress Subscribers Magnet for just $97 as per the following details:

How to get Subscribers Magnet for just $97?

• Make sure that cookies are enabled on your browser
• Click the banner above or this link to proceed to MaxBlogPress website to buy Subscribers Magnet. You must use either a credit card or PayPal to complete the purchase (Credit card purchases get more discount as explained below)
• After the purchase is completed, use the contact form on this blog to get in touch with me, providing your first name, last name, PayPal email ID (to receive rebate) and the purchase invoice details. The subject line should be “Subscribers Magnet Rebate“
• I shall send you $50 rebate for Master/Visa Credit card purchases and $30 rebate for PayPal purchases using the PayPal address provided
• Rebates should reach you within 15-20 days, unless there is any delay from the vendor or the affiliate manager’s end

What Subscribers Magnet is all about?

Subscribers Magnet lets you rapidly build your email list of your WordPress blog. Instead of using the traditional subscribe boxes alone, they use a bunch of unconventional methods to boost your WordPress list building process by up to 300%.

The following are some of the salient features of this plugin.

• Highly customizable subscription forms to suite the style scheme of your blog
• Un-obtrusive delayed pop-in forms, footer bars, in-content forms etc. You can position them at unimaginable places
• Auto form filler that fills in the visitors name and email address so that the visitor has to just click a button to subscribe
• Silent subscribe for your blog commenters so that they can quickly subscribe with just a click in the autoresponder
• It can work with other services such as AWeber, GetResponse and other major autoresponders
• Converts 15 of your 100 unique visitors into subscribers as against the typical conversion rate of less than 5 per 100

To learn more about this awesome WordPress plugin, please watch this cool video.

If you liked what you saw in the video, go for the awesome $50 off offer as I explained above. Because there’s no discount coupons/offers available for MaxBlogPress Subscribers Magnet anywhere else! And please note that it’s the purchase via credit card that gets you $50 discount!

Happy list building!

PS: Please go through our other exciting PayPal rebate offers on premium WordPress plugins such as OIOPublisher, WPRobot and MaxBlogPress Ninja affiliate plugin. Our PayPal rebate offers are genuine that guarantee 100% satisfaction because as a policy, we give away almost all of our affiliate commissions to our referrals.

In this post, I shall share a few tips that I have found working for me in order to increase search engine traffic of your existing content or the posts that are already published. We will be using only the Google Analytics and Google Webmaster tools to figure out where to optimize.

Step 1: Tap into your Top 10

Open your Google Analytics account and go to the Traffic Sources => Search Engines page. Filter by the ‘Landing Page’ option and increase date range to show the last three months search traffic.

The top 10 landing pages you see there – except the home or index page – are your:

i. Cash cows for monetizing your content via affiliate links or offers
ii. Linking sources to boost traffic to other potential pages

In this post we will be worrying only about the usage of your top landing pages for linking (Let me call this set of pages S1)

Step 2: Optimize your First Page listings

Now, open your Google Webmaster Tools account. Click ‘Your site on the web’ and then ‘Search queries’. Here, you have to select the time period from dropdown calendar to get a filtered duration of at least a month – ie. the past one month’s search queries. If the data is available, you can make the duration something like two or three months.

2.1 Top impression pages

Sort your Search queries list by Impressions. Now take a look at the CTR (Click Through Rate) of those search keywords. Pick ten pages that have very high number of impressions but a CTR of below 10%. These will be your top SERP pages that are not receiving much search traffic. Please note that to understand pages from keywords you have to click the ‘+’ sign in front of the keyword.

The above process can be tedious if you do within the Webmaster tools. But you have the chance to download it to Microsoft Excel and play around with filtering and sorting to arrive at your top impression pages (Let’s call it T1)

2.2 High CTR pages

Now sort the search queries listing by CTR. Pick the Top ten of them with exceptionally high CTR (sometimes even 60% or 70% for those #1 or #2 search position on Google). These keywords and their underlying pages are again potential candidates for linking from and let’s call them S2).

2.3 SERP runners ups

Again using the search queries results from the Webmaster tools, sort by Avg. Position. Pick those ten pages that are positioned in SERPs from 11 to 20. These are laggards that you can push further up to the front page with some effort. Let us call these pages T2.

Step 3: Optimize pages

Now it’s time to optimize your pages to get (a) improve SERP rankings and (2) better CTR. In order to do this, you have to do the following.

1. Using your Favorite SEO plugin such as All-in-one-SEO, improve the title and meta description of your ten pages (i.e. T1) from 2.1. Since they are already on the front page of Google search, you don’t need to really optimize the keywords or build links to them but just optimize the title and description to make the SERP results attractive thereby improving the CTRs or organic visits.

2. Link your target pages (T2 from 2.3) via appropriate keywords from source pages S1 and S2. Since S1 and S2 are high traffic and top ranked pages, linking from them will improve the search rankings (as well as page views per visit) of these secondary posts. If required, one could also do further keyword optimization on these pages.

3. You could always use the set of pages (S1 and S2) to link to other potential pages that you think need more attention. Also, you can improve the on-page SEO aspects of such target pages using keyword optimization and backlink building techniques.

4. You can also use S1 and S2 effectively to link to other ‘Related posts’ from them so as to increase the reach (page views on a single visit).

Summary

I hope the post wasn’t too difficult to understand. I have been using this technique to improve conversion rate on this blog. It’s pretty amazing how even some extra 10 page views from those vital pages can result in an affiliate sale. Hence it’s worth the effort.

By the way, you have to keep doing this exercise on a continuous basis or as and when you have time.

Sorry for not putting any pictures or illustrations as I didn’t want to expose my Google Analytics or Webmaster Tools content.

Happy SEO!

As a blogger, you have to continuously evolve, reassess, de-risk and diversify your blog income streams so that you can earn money for a prolonged time and increase the ROI.

Diversification of income channels

Your personal finance manager or investment adviser must have always told you about the need to diversify your investments. The case is much the same with your own business as well – however small or big it is – regardless of whether it is online or offline. In this post, we will be talking only about the online businesses and specifically around blogging.

When it comes to online income diversification, the following are the points to remember.

Multiple income options

Your blog needs to be monetized in more than one way – preferably a minimum of 4-5 ways – at any given point of time. I have seen many blogs that are dependent only on AdSense income and such blogs can die easily even at the hand of an evil visitor who could click-bomb your blog.

Continuous monitoring

When you have four or five income streams, it makes sense to keep record (e.g. an excel sheet) of the individual monthly earnings from these income channels. You have to then assess the trend over a number of months to take a call on which ones to discontinue or persist with. You have to research and dig out new earning means, before discontinuing the laggards.

Have more passive income streams

Practically speaking, it is not easy to have a passive income stream that is on complete autopilot mode. However, there are options such as multilevel affiliate schemes which keeps on churning in passive income even without doing anything. You need to have a blend of such instruments along with other actively managed options to optimize your returns.

Do not underestimate newer options

Even if you are doing exceptionally well with your blog income, you have to keep a watch on the newer methods that are being rolled in and be receptive to new ideas. Sometimes, low profile early adapters of new ideas will do better than big fishes in the long run. More often than not, identifying the right opportunities at the right time makes one successful.

De-risking aspects

Risk management is part and parcel of any business venture. Those who actively manage and mitigate risks are likely to go against all odds and emerge winners. As far as the online business risks are concerned, the following are some of the key points you have to keep in mind.

Never depend on a single brand or house

If you have to build a sustainable business model, you should not have a binding dependency to only one vendor or brand. For example, at the moment, many of us are too dependent on Google that, if Google bans your blog from getting indexed or from one of its key products, you are mostly doomed. Have you thought of an alternate plan beyond Google?

Technology independent content

Your content should not be dependent on any particular platform such as WordPress or blogger. Even if WordPress doesn’t exist tomorrow, you should still survive. Also, it is important to have your databases and backups stored in universal formats so that you can rebuild them into whatever is the trend of the day.

Do not blindly trust people

Many times, people who want to build their online business, fall prey to those Internet marketers who claim to have made millions via their magic systems and blueprints. Unless you are very sure, do not invest in those fraud systems.

Do not invest all your money online

One of the thumb rules of investment is that you should never put everything in a single instrument. Even when you want to start a new venture, invest only small amounts and based on the returns, you could take further action.

Keep taking money off the table

It is not at all a safe option to keep your earnings with online payment systems such as PayPal forever. You have to keep withdrawing money to your bank or local accounts regardless of trivial issues like exchange rates etc. You don’t want to lose all your hard earned money if a situation such as the recent PayPal India fiasco arise.

…and finally…

Do not quit your regular or full-time job

As much as possible, you must never quit your regular job to hunt the online goldmine. I may sound very pessimistic here but it’s my belief that sooner or later you either get bored with the online stuff or it may stop paying you the way it did in the past. In such cases, a steady and secure job always will always be the key to your long term success.

Happy money making!

When it comes to ad sales on a blog, one can either (1) opt for a complete on-premise option such as OIOPublisher ad manager which automates the whole thing or (2) outsource the headache to something like BuySellAds.com and mint money. In this post I shall review the awesome BuySellAds product.

BuySellAds Review

I have been with private ad sales for more than 1.5 years now and the OIOPublisher ad management software did a wonderful job for me until recently. However, when my marketing efforts reduced due to lack of time, it was getting more and more difficult to get good advertisers at the right price. That’s when I decided to try out BuySellAds and I must tell you that I managed to fill five slots out of seven in a matter of 10 days.

BuySellAds.com is a very simple and straight-forward blog ad network where bloggers sell their ad spots and advertisers purchase the same. The BuySellAds currently features close to 2000 publishers (bloggers) and more than 1000 advertisers. Hence there’s enough opportunity for you as a blogger to make money online with your blog.

Listing your blog on BuySellAds is free and fast process. After submitting your blog their and designing an ad zone, you can wait for advertisers to grab your ad spaces. BuySellAds requires you to install a javascript based tracking code on your blog so that they can report the number of page impressions generated by your blog for the benefit of advertisers. Ads are available in popular ad sizes such as 125×125, 180×150, 200×125, 260×260, 300×250, 728×90 or even a custom size of your choice. There can be image ads, image+text ads or text ads alone.

BuySellAds plus points

In my experience, the following are some of the major advantages of BuySellAds.

• It gives you tremendous visibility for your blog where as if you sell on your own, you need to do your marketing as well
• 25% cut kept by them is one of the best especially when you compare with BuySellAds competitors such as PerformancingAds, for example
• PayPal payout option, and that too twice per month (two cashout requests per month). Though, there’s a minimum payout restriction of $50, they aren’t very adamant on that rule. It’s really small publisher friendly
• Multiple banner sizes and flexible content options (image, text or mix of both)
• Instant approval and listing, unless you have some rated content on your blog
• Open listing and hence you can find out what your competitors are charging to arrive at the optimum pricing

Improvement areas

Though, this is by far the best blog ad network, I also faced certain issues which are improvement topics for the BuySellAds team.

The following are the issues I noticed.

• Though designing of an ad zone is easy, it is not very easy to change the styles. There’s no visual editor and hence you have to type in CSS if you want to change the default looks of ‘Advertise here’ zones
• When you have some open slots, they don’t align with the filled ad slots in the IE browser. Check out this blog on IE
• The ad server is slow and hence ads (javascript based) are loaded after most of your content is up and with a noticeable delay
• There is no option to show your own ads in case there are open slots. This is bad, because if two slots are free, you may not want to show ‘Advertise here’ twice. There’s an option to restrict it to one, but then it disturbs the styling
• If an advertiser purchases an ad and later he changes the target URL you get notified to approve the same, which is good. But if he redirects it to elsewhere, the publisher cannot prevent it. The publsher cannot even cancel the ads without taking out the entire zone. This has happened to me, check out one of the banners on the sidebar – it redirects to nowhere since last few days

How to make more money with BuySellAds?

The following are some tips for you as a BuySellAds publisher, of course, based on my short stint with them.

- Start with a smaller bid price for your ad slots as compared to your competitors with similar number of page views.
- Start with fewer slots such as 2 of 125×125 slots so that there are not too many empty slots. Keep adding more, as and when it gets filled
- Give it some time (2-3 weeks) for advertisers to notice you. The advertisers filter the listings by page views and keywords and hence, you need to wait till the page views are approximately calculated
- Use proper sales description for your listing (e.g. top right, above the fold etc)
- Keep your stats manually updated using the Update status button.
- Stick to most popular ad sizes
- Use as many keywords and tags as possible in your listing

Summary

In my experience so far with private and blog ad sales, there’s not really a better BuySellAds alternative for mid-size and small publishers. Even when you grow big time as a blogger and in terms of traffic to your blog, you may still use BuySellAds. You can see ad spot listing price as high as $2000 per slot there. Once you are confident of selling on your own, you may discontinue with BuySellAds to save that 25% cut but I would not do that soon.

Happy Money Making!

When it comes to autoblogging tools for WordPress, there’s no better name than the WP Robot plugin! In this post I shall review this powerful plugin and also offer you a whopping 50% discount on the full elite version by using our WPRobot coupon code ‘DOLLARSHOWER‘ (with 14-day money back guarantee!)

Benefits of Autoblogging

Before talking about WPRobot, let us understand the benefits that autoblogging (or autoposting) offers you:

• Firstly, autoblogging doesn’t require a blogger to write content but he instead gets the content automatically generated based on multiple sources and configurations
• You can churn out fresh content even while you sleep – there is no shortage of content as virtually anything on the web, these days, is syndicated (available as RSS feeds)
• Many autoblogs can attract a lot of traffic because the source content itself may be search engine optimized
• Autoblogging offers excellent online money making opportunity as a lot of affiliate content (Amazon, eBay etc) can get auto published
• Autoblogging is not spamming and doesn’t violate copyrights as long as you don’t republish copyrighted content

WPRobot WordPress Autoblogging Plugin

The WPRobot plugin for WordPress, basically allows you to set up a number of campaigns that are keyword driven and schedule them to be published as blog posts at a post frequency that you prefer.

For example, you can set it up to publish Amazon product listing and user reviews for Apple products (iPad, iPhone etc) at a specified post frequency. Based on your blog niche, you can vary and filter your content.

Well, what I mentioned above is a very small example, but the tool is so powerful that you can mix and match content from various sources such as Google news, Flickr, Youtube, Clickbank, Commission Junction etc and even blend it well within manually written posts, if you wish to do so. And the end result is a lot of affiliate income because you would have stored your affiliate IDs in the plugin settings and each outgoing click is recorded as your referral.

Sample auto blogs created via WP Robot

If you are wondering how some of the auto blogs look like, please take a look at the following sites. The content there in completely automatically created.

1. Apple Products Blog
2. Multiple Niche Blog

In fact, based your imagination, creativity and monetization needs, you can in fact create a lot better blogs than the demo blogs listed above.

WP Robot modules

The following are the various modules that is bundled with WP Robot. You have the option to purchase individual modules or whole (Elite full version) as a bundle and save money (50% as per our offer).

• Amazon Module – $40
• Article Module – $25
• eBay Module – $20
• Clickbank Module – FREE
• Yahoo Answers Module – $20
• Youtube Module – $15
• Translation Module – $15
• Flickr Image Module – $20
• Yahoo News Module – $15
• RSS Module – $20
• Commission Junction Module – FREE with Full Version
• Oodle Module – FREE with Full Version
• Shopzilla Module – FREE
• Press Release Module – FREE
• Twitter Module – FREE

If you want to know more about these modules and their powerful features please refer this page. Also, after the purchase you have access to a number of video tutorials to help you with the setup and effective usage of the WP Robot features.

Now, all the above modules together with the WP Robot Elite core ($30) should cost you $220/-. But wait, we are going to make that exactly 50% OFF deal for you.

WP Robot Elite Full Version at just $110 and How?

All that you have to do is to follow the exact steps given below:

Summary

Autoblogging is all about generating passive income and when it comes to automating WordPress blogs, WP Robot is the way to go. Buy this premium WordPress Plugin now and make money blogging on auto-pilot mode!

Happy (Auto)blogging and Money Making!

Other Hot Deals

50% OFF on OIOPublisher Ad Management plugin for WordPress
MaxBlogPress Ninja Affiliate plugin

In fact, there are only five known reasons for the ‘AdSense clicks but no money’ syndrome and let me explain these causes.

Five reasons why your AdSense clicks not getting any earnings

The wrong configuration is the #1 reason behind your AdSense clicks not fetching any earnings and hence the very first thing to check is your AdSense account configuration.

#1 Allowed Sites setup

You may not want to believe this but 8 out of 10 cases you lose all your earnings because of a stupid mistake or configuration done (probably by other Google applications and not you).

To check this issue, just take a look at your ‘Allowed Sites’ option under the ‘AdSense setup’ tab after logging to your account. In most cases, you will be having the option ‘Only allow certain sites to show ads for my account’ selected and you will be surprised to see something like www.blogger.com listed there.

To fix, click on the ‘Allow any site to show ads for my account’ option and click the ‘Save Changes’ button. In 90% of the cases this fix will work and your AdSense clicks will soon start showing earnings.

#2 CPM ads shown and not PPC ads

While the first reason, usually shows absolutely no earnings for any number of clicks, there’s this symptom whereby some clicks are earning money while some others are not. When this happens there are basically three reasons and the primary reason is that Google is serving some CPM ads to your sites rather than PPC (Pay-Per-Click) ads. CPM ads or Pay-Per-Impression ads do get paid very less – e.g. something like 30 cents per thousand impressions. Now, if you got a few 10s of 100s of impressions and even couple of clicks but no money, it usually means that a low cost CPM ad has been clicked. In this case you do not need to worry because as and when Google keeps serving more PPC ads, you will automatically receive money for your clicks (Read: Internet advertising models and compensation methods)

#3 Public Service Ads (PSA) being served

When you created your AdSense ad block, you would have seen an option (under More Options) that defaults to ‘Show public service ads’ if Google doesn’t have anything else to serve you or Google is busy analyzing your content immediately after setting up. If this option is checked, at times your ad blocks will be displaying free public service ads that do not get any earnings for clicks. In this case, you could choose ‘Show non-Google ads from another URL’ option or even opt to display blank space.

Hence public service ads are the third reason why some of your clicks are not accounted in earnings. However, for the sake of looks and consistency of your pages it’s better to allow PSA ads.

#4 Invalid clicks

Google has got a very smart fraud click monitoring mechanism with them and in most cases they do a good job by picking invalid clicks. Invalid clicks can be caused by a visitor continuously refreshing a click target page or keeps on clicking ads on the same page beyond a limit or even you yourself getting into ad-click-exchange deals (which is a dangerous thing to do). It can also be caused by the click-bots sending clicks to Google AdSense loaded pages. Very rarely Google click monitoring system can go wrong and actually count valid clicks as invalid as well. Whatever be the case, if this problem persists, it is better to notify Google about the issue so that it minimizes your chances of getting banned permanently. So invalid clicks are the fourth reason for no earnings despite clicks.

#5 You are being banned

In most cases the ban is instant and immediate following invalid or fraud clicks. However, there could be a situation whereby you see a lot of clicks on a particular day and in a few hours time you are slapped with a ban. It happened to me with my Google AdSense account. So if you notice significantly high number of clicks for much the same traffic or you feel that some clicks look like fraud activity, you may immediately alert the Google AdSense team of the same.

Summary

More often than not #1 and #4 are the main reasons for totally no earnings situation. #2 and #3 usually means some earnings here and there but not significant earnings.

Happy money making with AdSense!

• I have decided to discontinue my blogger (and other platform) based blogs and consolidate all of them at my new blog Ajith Prasad Edassery’s blog – Reloaded that has been reloaded and relaunched
• DollarShower will deal only with the specific topics such as blogging tips, Make Money Online, SEO etc. No more personal updates here
• I will be putting more Internet marketing efforts using these two blogs

AjithPrasad.com – Reloaded

I have been owning this domain since last ten years and on and off I have had content on it – varying from hand-coded pages, to my own CMS based blog to PHPNuke blog to WordPress. Since, it’s a very old domain, I thought it’s a better idea to keep it updated with my rants, thoughts and reviews in the areas of my interest such as cricket, automobiles, food, cooking, technology, politics etc. Basically, I have a lot more ideas to express in all the above topics rather than just writing about how to make money online.

Unfortunately, I could not retrieve and restore all my previous contents due to loss of some backup data. Going forward, though, I would like to keep my personal blog updated with interested content. At the moment, its design is not yet complete but moving to WordPress itself has been a major relief. It was really a painful process to extract content out of blogger and phpNuke DBs.

I would like you all to take a look at the reloaded ajithprasad.com and provide feedback.

Other updates

I have redesigned this blog with a brand-new logo which I got done by a professional designer. Unfortunately, I am not completely satisfied with the same yet and hence would want to change this theme itself along with a nice header banner soon.

On the money making front, I have started placing BuySellAds ad spots here on the sidebar starting with a very minimal monthly rate. I will be taking some measures to improve the traffic via targeted keyword optimization and SEO for the homepage.

That’s pretty much for now…

Happy Blogging!

Finding good keywords is no rocket science these days as search engines have mostly exposed search data (for their own business reasons) and keyword suggestion tools have made it easier to find keywords. Hence this post is not necessarily about how to pick good keywords but more about the traits of keywords that make them good based on what and how people search for.

Behavior and types of Internet search users

Even before getting into keywords, let us first try to understand the search behavior of the typical internet user. Majority of the newbies do very raw ad hoc searches (e.g. ‘best web hosting’) as they are totally clueless about any brands or even how to get started. The second category of the search users are those who know something. Their typical search would include some specific brand or product name (e.g. ‘hostgator hosting packages’). And the third category or a little more advanced users would go a few steps ahead and qualify the search phrase with actual destination related information (e.g. ‘dollarshower hostgator deal’ – not that I have an offer right now)

Now, traffic means money. Hence the Internet marketer’s aim should be to convert as many of the above categories of searches into sales. The conversion ratio of the first search category mentioned above will be very low where as advanced searches result in better conversions. It is practically impossible for any Internet marketer to target huge number of search phrases along a broad category of Internet users and hence it makes sense to understand various keyword types and seek some SEO help to pick the best ones.

Types of keywords

When it comes to what converge and convert, there are essentially three types of keywords:

1. Basic search or browse keywords
2. Comparison keywords or key-phrases
3. Keywords used for immediate buying

The above three are the logical three steps that form a buying decision. In the first step the product search takes place, then the comparison of different products and finally the purchase decision and execution.

Needless to say, if you want to sell more you need to have more comparison keywords and or more offer, deal, coupon related keywords.

Deriving from the above logic the best keywords are those phrases which are:

• between two to four words in length (e.g. ‘hostgator coupon code’)
• Not too generic or broad (e.g. ‘sewing machines’)
• Popular terminologies (e.g. use ‘tv’ instead of ‘television’ in a good search phrase)
• Not too specific (e.g. ‘Hostgator coupon code for June 2010’ – Good luck!)
• Not having many two letter or three letter words
• Not too competitive. This is more from the cost point of view

Optimize for those keywords

Now when you try to optimize for these keywords there are several things to be kept in mind.

Long tail v/s competitive keywords: Sometimes it makes sense to optimize for the spillover search terms than the most queried phrases, if cost is a concern. In that case, one can optimize the pages for long tail keywords.

Prepositions and connectors: While the search phrases may have prepositions and connectors, you may not necessarily optimize for them.

Misspelled keywords: At times it makes sense to optimize for misspelled keywords as well.

Keyword research tools

As I have maintained before, for consistent organic traffic, it is a good idea to optimize your web pages (posts, pages, homepage) for good keywords. There are several free tools that allow you to find keywords for your content.

The Google adwords keyword tool has recently revamped and it definitely has built all their search intelligence into it. However, it is targeted more at their PPC advertising customers rather than SEOs or webmasters. Most of the time the search numbers that you find there is hyped and based on the advertiser competition. If you want more realistic search numbers, you may use the free keyword discovery tool or the wordtracker free keyword suggestion tool.

Final thoughts

The keywords part of the ‘queen’ err SEO is a lot based on research and at times using trial and error as well. Keywords alone do not make good SEO but you need to have your pages back linked from other sites using those keywords as anchor text. I have talked about these topics in detail in my SEO – link building series that starts with the post titled ‘how search engines find your blog?‘. Please read those posts for more details on other relevant SEO aspects.

Happy SEO!

What is reseller web hosting?

Reseller hosting is a business model whereby your web hosting account resources (disk space, bandwidth, cpanel like tools, software etc) can be shared with your own customers or third parties to help host their websites.

How can the reseller hosting business work for you?

The money making opportunity that I would like to discuss here can work very well in developing nations where web hosting is still an expensive thing. We are talking about $4 or 5 for very basic hosting services unless somebody opts for hosting abroad. Now if you are able to provide quality hosting services for something like $2 per month, there will be a lot of blogs and mini websites that will be interested in your services. Now let’s calculate what it takes to run such a reseller business.

1. Find a good reseller host provider

You can find excellent reseller hosting services (such as Hostgator) for as low as $19.95 per month. They will provide you all technical infrastructure for disk space, bandwidth, email accounts,website design, maintenance and billing management of your own customers.

2. Brand name & website for your hosting service

Next, you need to have a website where you provide your hosting services. You need to have basic interfaces to promote your services, offer your packages etc. Rest of the things (e.g. billing modules) will be provided by the hosting service. If you are providing very cheap hosting service, you may not need to provide customer support. Otherwise, you may need to provide contact information for support. By the way, if you are a blogger, you can even offer these services on your blog itself.

3. Create your hosting plans

Here we are talking about splitting your $19.95 per month reseller plan into something like 50 or 100 slices whereby you charge your customers $1 to $3 per month.

An example is given below.

Your investment

Your premium reseller package: 120GB disk space, 1000GB bandwidth for $50
(Note: There are much cheaper options available)

Your returns

Your hosting package A: 500MB disk space, 4GB monthly data transfer for $2 pm.
Your hosting package B: 200MB disk space, 2GB monthly data transfer for $1 pm.

Please note that the package A will get you up to 240 clients that fetches up to $480 pm on an investment of $50 on a premium reseller hosting package. Makes sense? To make things even better you may even charge, for example, a $1 per every additional GB of bandwidth (You may have a one time investment on a small web site but that is not a recurring expense)

The value addition for your customers is the set of software and infrastructure you provide to host any blog platform or website of their choice. The model works well for upcoming bloggers.

The tricks of the reseller business model

The following are the tricks and challenges for the reseller hosting online business model.

Go local

A lot of people who are exposed to unlimited good quality shared hosting for $5 or $7 per month may ridicule this idea. But to be frank, there are 1000s of people who pay big hosting charges in their local currencies every month – either due to their lack of awareness or they want to pay in local currencies only and want to be in touch with the local people.

Cheap service, good quality

Of course, nobody can provide unlimited bandwidth and disk space for a $1 or $2 service. And it’s absolutely sufficient for small to medium size blogs and websites. For example, my blog at peak gets something like 5GB bandwidth usage per month. Hence in principle, I can still host this blog on a reseller host.

Offer attractive packages without support

Minimizing the customer support effort is the key to make a good margin in the case of reseller hosting business. You have to make the offers at very cheap prices with a disclaimer on no customer support. You can add a premium for email or phone support but even in this case it works out cheaper.

Low initial investment

You can start with one reseller account and keep upgrading it or go for additional accounts (recommended) as your business grow.

Challenges

Hosting is steadily becoming cheaper and cheaper especially due to dropping hardware prices and increased bandwidth availability. Hence at some point, it is going to affect your margins. But in developing nations, it is going to take five or ten years before hosting services are available at dead cheap prices. For example, 10 years back I used to pay $10 pm for my shared hosting services and I am still paying something like $7.

Over to you

Have you ever thought of this business model? If so what’s your opinion on the same?

Happy Money Making!

Update on 02-Sep-2010: The $30 discount offer is expired but we will still send you a rebate of $30 for credit card purchases and $20 for PayPal shopping. After the purchase, just contact us with your order details and PayPal email ID for claiming your rebate.

Get MaxBlogPress Ninja Affiliate Plugin for just $67!

Continue reading the review…

75% of my blog income comes via affiliate sales and this may be the case with majority of the established blogs – Make money online blogs or otherwise – unless someone is a devoted and single-minded AdSense fan.

When it comes to making money out of the content of a blog, the first name that comes to my mind is the Ninja affiliate plugin from MaxBlogPress that converts your blog post keywords into affiliate income with absolutely zero effort. Today’s post is a short review of this awesome affiliate marketing plugin for WordPress blogs and an unbeatable $30 discount offer on the ninja affiliate plugin (for the next five days for DollarShower fans and with 60 days money back guarantee!. See the offer link below!)

What is Ninja Affiliate Plugin all about?

The ninja affiliate WordPress plugin comes from the house of MaxBlogPress that has produced some exceptional plugins such as the famous stripe ads. What the Ninja affiliate plugin does is to convert some of the keywords or key-phrases in your blog posts into affiliate links there by giving you non-intrusive opportunities to generate greater blog income (You can notice the plugin in action on this blog post itself)

The following are some of the salient features of this plugin (Watch the video here for more details):

• Keywords can be easily added and managed along with affiliate links
• You can group keywords (e.g. have a ‘hosting’ group and add ‘shared hosting’, ‘dedicated hosting’ etc under that group)
• You can decide on the number of affiliate links per blog post
• Control how many times per post, a particular keyword needs to be shown as affiliate links
• Link cloaking and custom status bar text – Don’t scare your readers with those complicated affiliate URLs
• An option to insert available links directly into your blog posts while editing new posts
• Possibility to exclude certain blog categories and pages from showing affiliate links
• Apply styles to your affiliate links the way you want them
• Simple to understand click reports that shows the number of unique clicks, raw clicks per keyword

And all the above features to make easy affiliate income with a one click install plugin is available for just $97. But wait, for the next five days we are offering you a 30% discount on the Ninja affiliate plugin. In other words you can get this amazing affiliate marketing plugin for just $67 for limited time. You may click the link below to avail this offer, currently available only through us.

Yes, I want the Ninja Affiliate Plugin for just $67 Now!

Why pay for an affiliate plugin?

Because good things don’t come free! Of course, there may be free link cloakers and keyword farming plugins available out there but none of them gives so much control over how your keywords (and how many) need to be converted into affiliate links with their performance reports. And more over the $67 you spend could be as well recovered in your first affiliate sale itself.

Happy Money Making!

- offer them quality blog posts (content)
- present and organize them well (style)
- articulate your thoughts in a simple to understand way (language)

While the first part (content) is the prime ingredient to your blogging success, it would help if you have great content but bad presentation and poor language. The written language and the visual styling together define the readability of your blog or website and that’s our topic of interest for today.

Blog styling and themes

Well, I am not a styling expert and hence would stay away from making a lot of suggestions on this point. However, from my software experience around visual components development, UX (user experience) evaluation etc, I feel that the following parameters define the readability of websites.

• font size
• colour contrast
• emphasizing, underlining & highlighting
• illustration support (charts, diagrams…)

The above four are probably the key things to be kept in mind while designing (e.g. blog themes) and organizing content. In addition, there are accessibility standards for visually challenged people etc.

[What if you come across a blog with excellent content that is hard to read? You can either use the feed or use a website readability enhancer]

Language and readability aspects

Your blog’s content readability depends a great deal on the selection of words, formation of sentences and then paragraphs. Smaller sentences without too many repetitive words and relatively smaller paragraphs are pleasant to reader.

There are a number of algorithms and measures to check the readability of a blog or website content. The Gunning-Fog index is one of the methods which is calculated as follows:

Fog Index = (average number of words per sentence + average number of difficult words per sentence) * 0.4

Lower the Fog Index, better readable your blog is. For example Income tax rules, law books, government publications etc will have a very high Fog index where as comics and novels will have a lower Fog index.

Similarly there are other algorithms such as Flesch reading ease algorithm, Coleman-Liau method etc. You can read more about them under the Wikipedia readability topic.

How to test the readability of your blog?

There are a number of online tools available that could help you to analyze the readability of your blog. You can find one such readability tester here.

I got a reasonably good Fog Index (8.99) for this blog – probably because my language is not all that sophisticated. Check your blog’s readability today and share your results here as comments.

Readability is, definitely, what highlights your content and thoughts. Things like blog themes and styling can be outsourced but not always your own language. Hence readability becomes all the more important for a blog and the blogger!

Happy Blogging!

What is Google alerts?
Just in case you didn’t know it yet (which I doubt), Google alerts is a web content monitoring service. It’s a free service that anybody with a Google account could readily use and get notifications in your email inbox as and when new web content (news, blog posts, video etc) of your interest is available. Now let us know it in detail and see how it can help you in your online business.

Google alert types & excellent usage patterns

You can get alerts as and when the event occurs or get consolidated alerts once in a day/week. The following are the basic alert types that Google supports:

• News alert: Helps you monitor new news items
• Blog content alert: Keep track of the blogosphere via specific content filters
• Web alert: know what people are searching for or whether people are searching for certain things – again based on your fine filters (Update: As of June first week, Google has retired web alerts and now ‘Everything’ alert is as good as Web alerts)
• Video alert: Know when popular online tube channels get new content
• Groups alert helps you get alerted on groups and forums related content changes
• Everything which means all the above types of content alerts

Well, it sounds ridiculously simple and lame but let us make it more exciting by using appropriate search terms and filters.

1. Track blogosphere

Of course, you have your RSS reader that fetches you updates from those blogs you follow. However, if you want to know what is new in the blogosphere with respect to certain topics, you might want to set a Google alert with alert type as Blog. You may enter as many search terms or keywords as you need to support proper filtering of the alerted content. It can help you not only learn things but also get great blog post ideas as well. Also, if you want to write about a certain topic in the near future, it’s always better to keep Google alerts on those topic search terms.

2. Know what people are talking about you

Well, who doesn’t want to know what others are talking about you? When you are a blogger you might also want to know what people are talking about your blog as well. I have an alert type of Everything on keywords such as dollarshower, “ajith edassery”, “ajith prasad edassery” etc to help Google alert me as and when somebody talks about me or my blog on the web. It can work for you as well.

3. Get to know who is researching your site

This is important as a blogger. Sometimes there are these enthusiastic ‘somebody’ who wants to know your blog/site stats etc. To get an email notification when such people research your blog, place a Web alert type with your site’s URL as the search term in the following format.

link:www.dollarshower.com

4. Help your buying decisions

For most of my online buying, I always used some kind of discount coupons. How do you find the latest coupons on the net? Just place a Web alert type on that product coupon search terms. (e.g. hostgator coupon, maxblogpress ninja affiliate coupon etc). You will be amazed at the number of coupon alerts you may receive, of course depending on the product popularity itself.

5. Know your competition

This one is related to point (2). Just like knowing yourself, you might want to know a little more about your competitors as well in certain cases. For example, the web searches on your competitor keywords or top level domain name itself. You may place appropriate alerts (Web or Blogs) to know more about your competition and then compare it with your own alerts.

6. New products tracking

As and when new products (like Apple iPad) hit the market, there will be a flurry of articles and news items about the same. If you are a keen researcher or want to be always updated about what’s happening around, Google alerts can be a great companion for you. You may use News alert type for any news item related to the new product (search term). Be sure to use multiple search terms such as Apple iPad, iPad launch etc.

7. Track your marketing campaigns

Your marketing campaigns, blog contests, give-aways and the buzz around them can be easily tracked via Google alerts if you use appropriate search terms in Google alerts.

If you are an active Google alert user, you may have other points to add here. If so, please feel free to share the same with our readers.

Happy Googling!

The first part of the report contains the type of the blogger. For example, based on dollarshower.com as the input, it categorized me as a duty fullfiller who is conservative by nature and often reluctant to take risks which I tend to agree – especially the risk part.

Detailed Analysis

Along with the detailed description on your personality, it also outputs your brain map which shows which part of your brain is active while you are writing. My brain map as output by the typealyzer is given below.

This simple tool is based on the uclassify free web service that can analyze and classify text.

Over to you

Based on the tool output, let me and the readers know what kind of a blogger personality are you.

Happy Blogging!

HTML5 features

I am not going to do a HTML4 vs HTML5 comparison study here but would like to emphasize on the major changes that HTML5 is bringing in. In short, the following is the summary of features that HTML5 boasts (of course, I am yet to really experiment with coding part of it):

• HTML5 will be a self sufficient language that avoid the need to have browser plugin based rendering technologies such as Adobe Flash, Microsoft Silverlight etc
• The HTML5 code would actually reflect the structure (XML) of the page and hence there will be minimal inline styling and tags such as div will be used for demarcating clear logical sections. Moreover, there will be more realistic elements such as section, article, header, footer than finer granular elements
• Powerful vector graphics support via HTML tags and this is part of the DOM (Document Object Model). No more Flash like technologies required for graphics
• HTML5 inherently will support audio, video element types and hence there is no need of an embedded media player object and umpteen number of file types
• Powerful GeoLocation APIs to exactly pinpoint the location from where the user is browsing – even when browsing from a mobile phone
• No applets and ActiveX objects required in your browser and hence lesser security threats
• Offline caching features to support offline browsing (mainly meant for enterprise mobile applications)
• Uniformity of the language offers ease of coding and maintenance. At any point of time there’s only one type of source code i.e. HTML5 (and JavaScript as well)
• HTML5 offers backward compatibility HTML4

In short, a more powerful Web language is in the offing that can really wipe out Adobe Flash. As you probably read recently, Apple has already said that they will NOT support Flash in their mobile platforms.

How can HTML 5 change blogging?

First of all, there will be major changes to your WordPress (or Blogger) platform itself to support the HTML5 rendering. I am not sure when these platforms will start changing, but I expect it to happen within an year from now as browsers start supporting HTML 5.

Theme developers will find it exciting to develop their more structured themes in order to help integrate content seamlessly into styles. The amount of code to be written will surely reduce and debugging time will be lesser as well due to highly structured blog content as rendered via HTML5. There are already some themes available with HTML5 support but I personally believe that having blog templates alone in HTML5 may not be sufficient unless WordPress reorganizes the content editing features better.

Bloggers will find it easier to integrate content such as Video, Audio into their blogs. Moreover, providing powerful blog post support content such as graphics, diagrams, charts etc will become very easy with HTML5 support that’s provided by blogging platform. This should make bloggers’ life easy. And providing unique and customized content for readers based on their location will be another easy possibility via geo location identification (well, that’s too much to ask from WordPress though)

Content uniformity will ensure that you don’t have multiple media types, flash etc on a single page. Even advertisements and any other third party content will only have HTML5 and JavaScript alone at the end. This is expected to make the browsers render content faster than today’s rendering speed.

And hopefully, the bloggers will be provided with a much more simplified blogging platform interface so that they can really focus on what they are good at i.e. blogging.

I also have some concerns. I am not really sure (or understood) what will happen to the HTML 4 tags that you have written into your blog posts. Due to backward compatibility most of it should get rendered properly however, it depends on the WordPress team as to how proper migration can be guaranteed. The last thing bloggers want is re-editing all their posts.

HTML5 Browser Support

At the moment, Microsoft seems to be leading the pack in terms of HTML 5 browser support with the Internet Explorer 9.0 pre-releases already showcasing HTML5 support. Safari 4.0, Firefox 3.5 and Google Chrome already have the HTML 5 Audio and Video support. Geo-location APIs are already supported by Firefox (and not other browsers as I understand).

Looking at the way things progress, we should see almost all leading browser applications having 100% HTML5 compliance a few months from now.

Conclusion

As a programmer (and blogger), I am truly excited about the changes that HTML5 is bringing in. I am hopeful that, soon I will be able to write some HTML5 code around themes or plugins in order to experiment with the same. The HTML 5 draft specifications will be soon becoming the recommendation from W3C and that will form a major landmark for the web for years to come.